The next generation of Instapaper→

Marco Arment:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.

I'll admit I was shocked to see this, but I can see why Marco took this path. Just from reading his blog about how much time it take to work on The Magazine, I couldn't imagine how he'd find time for Instapaper as well.

Instapaper is one of those apps I have had a long relationship with, and one I hope will have a continued and wonderful future. Congrats, Marco.

¶ Yummy Yummy Chat Heads

I have to admit, like my friend David Chartier, I am a rare breed of nerd who actually likes Facebook. David talked a lot about Facebook Home and its potential. I want to talk about the new iOS app, Facebook 6.0.

The 6.0 update to the Facebook app streamlines the interface for the better, and beefs up its messaging capabilities. One way it does this is through Stickers, which are fun little pictures you can sling around through private or group messages. They’re cute, because they were designed by the awesome David Lanham.

But the real news here is Chat Heads, which show the avatar of the friend(s) you are currently chatting with in a little circle off to the side of wherever you are inside Facebook’s app. You can simply tap the circle and a conversation expands as a layer on top of where you are at, you send a message, tap the circle again, and it collapses the conversation and you go right back to where you were.

It’s a really enjoyable and nice experience.

On Facebook Home for Android, Chat Heads can appear anywhere on your device, even when you are in another app. Right now, this only works within Facebook on iOS, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it stayed that way.

But here is why I like the concept of Chat Heads, and where I’d like to see them go as a concept.

I like that they are not too intrusive during a conversation when you are doing something else. And I think they’d be the perfect interface for iMessage. Right now on iOS, it is kind of jarring to have an active back and forth with a friend over iMessage when you are also trying to look at or do something else. You switch fully from what you are doing to the conversation, then have to switch fully back.

Let’s say I am writing up a post like this on my iPad. I would much rather an iMessage come up off to the side as a little icon and wait for me to tend to it. I simply tap the icon, a conversation popover appears, I fire off a sentence, and tap back to what I am doing. It is a much less distracting way of giving a few seconds for a reply. Why?

Because even though it is a context switch, it is a very good illusion of a partial context switch (which doesn’t exist). It feels like you are only giving away attention peripherally, instead of having to be ripped from your focus of one app and dumped into another. Because you feel like you only give away quick aside of context, and you can see the task at hand right behind the conversation popover, it is easier to return to what you are doing.

Facebook and Apple seem to have a nice relationship, what with the deep integration with iOS and OS X last year. I hope that relationship could start a collaboration where maybe Apple can use the Chat Heads concept for iMessage and SMS, if they also allow Facebook Messages to be a global deal through it. I think I’d be okay with that, especially if there were a toggle.

Quote of the Day: Bill Kunz→

In reference to the previous post, Bill Kunz, maker of App.net client Felix:

"Wonder if this movie's good." $10. "Try the new Burginator Deluxe!" $6. "Haven't heard of that beer before." $3-5. "New restaurant in town!" $30-$200

"Huh, an app. I really need a free trial." $0.99

A $5 app isn't expensive→

I’m neither an economist nor a psychologist, but it strikes me that too many iOS device owners fail to act in their own best interests—both in the immediate near term and in the long term—when they scoff at the thought of spending money in the App Store. Here’s how customers who spend lavishly on iOS hardware punish themselves by skimping on apps.

Lex Friedman makes the case for paying good money for your great apps. If you are one who balks at an app that costs more than a buck or two, you need to go read this.

Heck, read it anyway.

iOS 7 Settings→

Louie Mantia imagines what iOS 7 may look like from the Settings app. I love his use of Avenir, a font that I have absolutely fallen in love with. I use it in any app I can (e.g., Day One and Twitterrific 5).

Louie makes a lot of other smart decisions, and I think I would love it if iOS got a bit of a makeoverin this style.

Some related reading would be Chairman Gruber's little birdies.

So Panic Took a Hacksaw to a Lightning Digital AV Connector

…and found the tiniest little computer. Fascinating.

1Password 4.1 for iOS

My company recently shipped a huge update to our new iOS app, 1Password 4 for iOS, and among many bug fixes, new password fonts, and other things, we also added URL support.

My favorite of these is that if you are on a site in Safari, you can add op before the http and that address will open in 1Password's 1Browser.

Even better, Federico Viticci concocted a little bit of JavaScript that you can add as a bookmarklet to automate the process. Just simply add a bookmark somewhere, and then edit the address and replace it with this:

javascript:window.location='op'+(window.location.href);

Then name it something clever like Send to 1Password. I hope you enjoy this neat little feature.

1Password 4 for iOS

I am a little late in posting this, as I've been busy at my day job at AgileBits. A week and a half ago we released the much anticipated 1Password 4 for iOS.

It's really fantastic and we worked a long time on it. It is on sale for $7.99 until the end of 2012, and when 2013 arrives it will go to its normal price of $17.99. If you need a last minute gift for the nerd in your life, go get it on the App Store.

¶ Twitterrific 5 for iOS | Review

I love Twitter. Most of my friends over the past few years, both local and afar, started as acquaintances on Twitter. For the years that I have been on Twitter there is one app that I have used primarily to interact with the service — Twitterrific.

Twitterrific has had a mixed past. It started as simple as Twitter itself, and contributed some features back to Twitter that we all take for granted now. While Twitterrific’s roots are on the Mac, it is the iPhone, and later the iPad, where its story really takes flight.

A Brief Overview of the Past

Twitterrific for iOS was my first app downloaded from the App Store as soon as I had purchased my iPhone 3G on launch day in July 2008. The initial iOS app was a basic way to read, tweet, and reply, just like its big brother on the Mac. And it was fantastic in its simplicity.

I have always admired The Iconfactory for their attention to simplicity.

That is why Twitterrific 2 was a little surprising. It packed in just about every feature that could be thought of but the kitchen sink. However, it suffered from feature creep and interface bloat. And The Iconfactory knew it.

When the iPad came out, The Iconfactory was again first to have an app out for the new device. They took the opportunity afforded to them by the short time to develop the app to strip Twitterrific back to basics. Where version 2 had feature overflow, Twitterrific for iPad went back to the bare minimum.

Then Twitterrific 3 (and 4, since 4 was really an evolution of 3) came to the iPhone, actually being an update to the iPad app. It had the same feature set as the iPad app did, and cautiously returned features as needed. However, Twitterrific remained very bare bones compared to other apps, something I enjoyed. As I alluded to earlier, I am a fan of simplicity.

That is not to say I didn’t have some qualms with Twitterrific 3 & 4. It always felt a step behind other clients, and it had really started to show in recent months.

Twitterrific 5

Today we have Twitterrific 5. It is not only an all-new direction for The Iconfactory and Twitterrific, but it is a new direction for the potential of an iOS app.

Twitterrific 5 feels like the intersection of all the great interface aspects of iOS, Palm’s WebOS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

Twitterrific 5 captures the smoothness and fluidity of iOS, a look and feel reminiscent of Windows Phone, and the “sidebar”, browser, Tweet composer, and image popovers pay homage to WebOS’ cards.

The First Run Experience

When you launch Twitterrific 5 for the first time, it will ask you if it can access your Twitter accounts in iOS’ settings. When you allow it to, it will show the avatars of all the accounts you have signed in to iOS. Tap each one you want to add, and Twitterrific handles the rest.

In the past, and in other clients, you would have to be shown an ugly Twitter web form to sign in with manually. Somehow The Iconfactory has cooked up some secret sauce that will take care of business for you.

The Timeline

Twitterrific’s timeline is cleaner than ever. Controls for reply, retweet, favorite, and an ellipses for more items appears on a tap of a tweet. Delightfully, gestures are also integrated. Swipe a tweet from the left to right to reply, and from right to left to see a conversation.

The timeline has a setting to be unified, showing all replies and direct messages in the main timeline. This is Twitterrific’s hallmark since the beginning, and I am glad to see it still there.

Along the top there is a circle with your profile picture on the left, a capsule navigation for the main timeline, replies & mentions, and direct messages. On the right is the Compose button.

Timeline

Twitterrific 5 now supports proper gap detection in the timeline, signified by a tiny capsule with an ellipses smack in the middle of the horizontal rule that separates tweets.

That separator also glows purple to serve as the last read point when syncing the timeline either via iCloud or Tweet Marker.

To refresh the timeline, Twitterrific 5 now uses Pull to Refresh. They rolled their own custom pull to refresh and it is adorable. Look below.

Pull to Refresh

I mentioned the unified timeline earlier. In the past the entire cell that contains the tweet would be color coded to show what kind of tweet you were seeing. Green for your own tweets, orange for mentions, and blue for direct messages. In Twitterrific 5 the cell is not colored, but rather the text itself. There are even a couple shades of orange and blue, the first to show whether a mention is just a mention or a reply, and the latter to show whether a direct message is sent or received.

Filtering by direct messages used to be a bit of a chore, because there was not a way to thread the conversation. Now, simply swipe a direct message toward the left and the conversation will thread, just like mentions. This is a huge improvement.

The Sidebar Card, or As I Like to Call It, the Sidecard

Sidecard

Tapping the circle with your profile picture in it will bring up what I am calling the Sidecard. It is pretty much the Sidebar of old, but it literally looks like a floating card. From here you can browse saved searches and lists. You can also tap the search button to search for tweets, or the newly added People. I have been wanting people search in Twitterrific for a long time.

At the bottom of the Sidecard, you will see Accounts, which brings up your various accounts, the format panel, and the Settings panel.

Protip: Tapping and holding the circle with your profile pic at any time will bring up the account switcher. I love this!

The format panel, which is shown by two A’s, sized differently, allows you to change the font, the font size, the spacing between lines, avatar size, dark theme and light theme, and brightness.

I appreciate the ability to choose which size the avatar is shown at, as you can reduce it to nothing. I go to an area of the Middle of Nowhere twice a year, and being able to cut out loading avatars at that time will save on bandwidth, battery, and time.

Settings lets you change the sync service, its behavior, notification sounds (which I love the new sounds), whether or not to have a unified timeline, and my favorite, automatically turning on the dark theme at night. It flips to dark at 7pm local time and back to light at 7am.

The Help button in the Settings panel explains the various gestures available. There’s good stuff there. Be sure to check it out.

Composing

Composing a tweet is rather straightforward. You tap out your tweet. If you don’t like it, tap the character count to bring up a delete circle, tap again to delete it all.

Tap the location glyph to add your location, or the camera to add a photo.

There is no longer a choice of photo services. It is just Twitter’s photo service. I’m okay with that.

However, it is somewhat misleading in that Twitterrific will let you take a video or choose one from the library, but it will not upload anywhere. The Iconfactory told me this is an oversight, and video options will be removed for now in a future update. They didn’t say, but I suspect they think Twitter will have its own video service. Honestly, it makes sense. If that happens, I am sure we will see the return of video uploading to Twitterrific.

Taking Flight

In the week I have had Twitterrific 5, I am enamored with the new direction The Iconfactory has taken their flagship app. It is clean, light, and fun. Delightful and adorable are other adjectives I’ve used so far.

Everything loads fast, looks fantastic, and the gestures have ruined me.

Twitterrific has been and still is my favorite Twitter app. Of course, there is room for improvement, but there always is. The Iconfactory told me streaming is on the roadmap, as well as a Mac counterpart (I can’t even look at the Mac app anymore, that’s how good this is).

Twitterrific 5 is available now (or will be shortly) on iTunes for an introductory price of $2.99. The regular price will be $5.99.

Twitterrific 5 doesn’t have all the bells & whistles. But I do think it has what most people will want out of a Twitter client. Just enough power to do more than before, but not overwhelming where many features go unused.

If you appreciate fantastic design, speed, and overall delight, Twitterrific 5 is for you.

1Password 4 for iOS Sneak Peek

Disclaimer: I work for AgileBits, makers of 1Password.

The company I work for, AgileBits, gave iMore a sneak peek of 1Password 4 for iOS. Everything that I can probably say about the app at this stage is said in iMore’s article, so I encourage you to go check it out.

We’re all pretty excited to get this out to all of you. It really is an amazing improvement to our iOS app.